The Scary Door Episode 1
Grey static consumes the screen. Several brief flashes of random commercials play, then seem to abruptly shear off between one frame and the next. The screen goes briefly dark before a white door looms out of the darkness. It looks perfectly ordinary, a wooden door with four perfectly symmetrical impressions and a wooden door handle. A white message that reads "The Scary Door" is done in white over the screen as the hideous squeal of the door cues the eerie music to begin playing. The camera zooms through the opening door as the music swells. Past the door is a mlange of images. Pyramids. Clocks without hands. Junkpiles from which staring eyes seem to constantly watching. Tubes, retorts and an assemblage of jars bubbling with strange fluids. Images flicker across the screen, momentary glimpses into.. something. The music swells to a crescendo, then sharply falls away as the screen compresses into a white horizontal line. A title riding that thin white line reads "Victorious" before the white line and the title compresses into a tiny white dot that blips out of existence. War. The sound of gunfire. The ratcheting metallic clank of metal against metal. The whistling shriek of bombs. The screen is full of old war footage, a black and white cornucopia of death. The audio gradually fades, the images becoming grainy and imprecise. One clip bleeds into another in a wash of peppery static. One image is the same as another. All images are the same. The audio dips down to silence. The images end, replaced by a dark, strange space. A cramped space. A junkion huddles in this dark space, almost a cabinet. His armor is nonsdescript and mostly a dull, dull grey. Something is painted on his shoulder. In the dim lighting, it reads. 'ISTRT' An invisible voice begins to narrate. "Enter Victor Reyes, fourty-two, a tired and invisible man trapped in the dungeon of his own mind. An inmate of his own choices who clings to hope as he spirals in a technological marvel from a distant star." Stars. A universe of stars seen through a thick window. It's the viewing window of the small space revealed to be a control room. Earth can be seen from that distant vista, a ball of distant swirling blue. There is a spaceship docked nearby with the same label as the junkion. The larger print is legible as "Inter Stellar Terran Research Team" . The spaceship looks torn up, punched through with multiple holes. The junkion stands, optics glassy as he moves towards the door. The invisible narrator speaks up again. "It is not a hope for himself. It is a hope for peace." Victor pauses near the door, staring at the corner near the doorway where a dark figure looms. The junkion cringes back away, dropping his eyes immediately. "Who,what do you want? I.. I did as you asked. I did everything that you asked. Isn't that enough? Just.. just leave me alone. Hey. Hey, are you even listening to me? I did what you asked, now you're supposed to make everything better. Right.. RIGHT? You're going to.." Victor lunges forwards at the dark figure, but it's revealed to be nothing more than shadows and a discarded jacket. The junkion's shoulder plates slump in defeat. He puts a hand on the wall to steady himself. "It's for the best." he opens the door, moving out into the corridor. "There's.. it's.. it's better for everyone." < "..a sum of dollars or else there might be.. an improper tuning of this space cannon. These mistakes happen after all. It's simply a risk you took by not using it while you had it." Victor looks absolutely stricken, the film hazing to reveal a flashback. The smiling face of that gold-backed junkion, how he puts a hand on Victor's shoulder. "No. No, nothing like that! We're a peaceful order. All we want is an opportunity to make things better. Your government had that chance. What did they do? Stuck their head in the sand. Pretended it didn't exist. Now.. all I want you to do is get us on that ship." End flashback. Victor looks into the control center. A look of betrayal on his face, he stares out the little window at the blue sphere. The camera shudders, the view intersplicing with the war footage. The sound of bombs and the jolt of laserfire over the wheeling ransom voice of the junkion mastermind. "No." Victor steps into the room, where it whisks shut behind he. He slams a fist into the control panel, sending sparks flying everywhere. This draws the attention of the leader, who bolts upright in the chair just as Victor slams into him. "You said there would be Pie!" the last word skipping, replaced with 'peace' as if a badly edited afterthought. The two junkions battle, but the gold backed is obviously superior and easily overwhelms the grey junkion. "You said you wanted to make everything better!" Victor wheezes, laid out on the floor with the leader over him. "Nobody wants peace, kid. Whether it's us vs them or all of us vs alien freakazoids from Pluto. They just want something new to shoot at." Victor struggles up heroically, falling back against the control panel as the leader shoots him. As fluid starts to leak into the controls, they begin to flash and whirl more quickly. As the leader comes close to examine the panels, Victor grabs the gun and shoots him, pushing him away from the panel before.. painfully, he turns to look with blind optics at the controls. "Peace.. peace" he drones, turning a dial.. flipping a switch as he sags on the console, sliding down it to clatter to the floor. A blinding flash. Earth. Empty playgrounds creak. Empty supermarkets loom on empty streets. Cars left abandoned. Leaves blow across an open courtyard, and there is no sound but the whisper of the invisible voice. As the camera pulls back.. and back, revealing an empty town, an empty country, and empty world. Peace at last. "Victor Reyes, a victim of his own hopes. A man driven to fight for peace at any cost, only to realize how brittle that peace truly is and how very twisted it can be. A man and his plight, and that of countless others, that can be seen.. behind The Scary Door. "